I have frequent problems when opening the import module. It will collapse (lock) the whole program and often will not allow me (after forcing a shut-down) to reopen it even as an administrator. This often happens when I'm trying to import a photo from my local drive when I'm browsing down to find the applicable folder holding my picture. this happens too frequently (actually should not be happening at all). I have to then delete the program and download from Adobe. Can someone help me onthis? What's going on?

It sounds like your computer has a bigger problem Kevan. I might be wondering about a dying hard drive, or a problem in the operating system.

There are a couple of things you could try, in terms of trashing preferences and trying a clean catalog, but my first port of call would be to test LR in a clean user account and to run some hardware checks.

The computer is five months old; windows 7. I've done a number of diagnostics with the Dell folks to make sure it's not the computer. I noted the other complaints about the import module that are associated with the USB drives. I unplugged the usb peripherals, put my mouse in a different one temporarily; and rebooted the machine. It works fine.

Now, here's the issue in this. I'm not the only one that is experiencing the same problems where the import module triggers some kind of mis-pointer. When this happens, LR will NOT work at all. It is completely non-responsive and I have to kill it to get out of it. Then, it will not come up at all, even as administrator. So, I either have to unplug the USB peripherals and restart (restarting alone does not work) or have to reload LR from scratch.

I also did something else this time. I still had LR3 on my computer. I deleted the program. So, was it unpluggint the USB peripherals, or deletion of LR3 that brought the program back to sanity? Don't know; any possibility of LR3 confusing the computer as to which is the master program?